Review – Avengers: Infinity War

An unprecedented cinematic journey ten years in the making and spanning the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel Studios’ “Avengers: Infinity War” brings to the screen the ultimate, deadliest showdown of all time. The Avengers and their Super Hero allies must be willing to sacrifice all in an attempt to defeat the powerful Thanos before his blitz of devastation and ruin puts an end to the universe.

What We Thought:

I liked Avengers: Infinity War, but didn’t love it. There are things I loved about it, but there is too much going on at times and at other times it’s a bit slow. It’s worth seeing and is better than Avengers: Age of Ultron, but it wouldn’t crack my top 5 MCU films. I’m going to try to be as spoiler-free as possible.

I’ll start with the positives. I’m one of the few people who didn’t like Thor: Ragnarok. I like the Thor character and that movie wasn’t Thor. It was someone trying to shove Thor and his friends into an MCU blockbuster and I didn’t like it. I’m happy that Thor is back to being a likable character in this. I loved his back & forth with Rocket and the God of Thunder is badass once again. I won’t spoil what he gets in it either!

Speaking of Rocket, this is the first time the Guardians of the Galaxy interact with other MCU characters and I think they steal the show. Thor and Rocket are great together, but Drax continues to be one of my favorite characters. Dave Bautista was a scene stealer in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and he’s equally good in this. Drax is such an underplayed character with great one liners.

The climatic battle is pretty badass as well. The actual ending is trash (I’ll somewhat explain in a bit), but the battle between our heroes and Thanos and his crew is cool. It’s our first time seeing all these characters interacting together and that’s fun to see. Cap fighting side by side with Black Panther. Bucky, Falcon and War Machine shooting alien creatures. Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and Okoye fighting together with girl power. All pretty cool.

But unfortunately, that’s also one of the issues with the film, the need to get EVERYONE in it. There are times you forget some characters are in the movie. Spider-Man, Iron-Man and Doctor Strange are on alien ship trying to protect the green stone. Then you cut back to Earth and Captain America is taking Vision to Wakanda to protect the yellow stone. Cut to the Guardians and Thor in space hunting down Thanos. Cut to Gamora having daddy issues with Thanos. Back to Earth for Vision and Scarlet Witch! With so much going on, it feels cluttered at times and you lose track of who is doing what. It also slows the film down at times in order to sneak in all that’s happening. The movie feels like a set up to future movies just here to establish character storylines for upcoming MCU films.

My biggest issue with the film though is the actual ending. If you don’t know, there will be another Avengers film following this. Knowing that, you know there really isn’t a 100% solid ending to this one. It has an open ending which I expected but that ending is sort of ridiculous. If you know the comics, follow the movies and know about actors’ contracts, you know some characters have to die in the movie. Some die in the course of the movie and you expect that. But what I don’t like is that some characters die and you know it’s not the truth. You know they will return in the next movie so their deaths feel anti-climatic. You know they have future movies under contract or you know they are too new to the universe to be killed off that you have no emotional response to their death. If a major character dies (even if expected) you want to feel something like Han Solo dying in The Force Awakens. With these deaths, because you know it’s not real, you just shrug it off and have to wait to see how they come back in the next one.

Avengers: Infinity War is good, but not great. It’s going to make $2 billion + worldwide at the box office. It will sell a ton of merchandise and you’re probably going to see it. I wanted a bit more from it, but let’s be honest, it’s still 1000000x better than anything DC Comics is putting on the big screen.